Hushed Galleries & Early Morning Commutes

Excerpts from a diary I have unintentionally been keeping in my phone notes.

Evening, sometime in mid October

I think it’s a full moon tonight, or maybe a new moon, I need to check. I’m driving down to the new place I’m moving into, choking back the tears that are rising like a fist in my throat whilst holding onto my small dog plush toy I won at a fairground a couple of years ago with Sam. We had gone at the end of summer, my first August living back in south London, and marvelled at the juxtaposition of the colourful helter skelters and rickety rides against the sunset, all staged upon a field which urban legend has it is in fact a plague pit. I won the dog in a prize-every-time hook a duck stand after we had tried several others and failed miserably (much to our entertainment). The dog looks quite like my little ghost, who I rescued a year and a half or so later. A coincidence that feels like it was a premonition. 

My dad remarks that they’re going to start charging a toll fee to go through the Blackwall tunnel. Already strapped for cash in one of the most expensive times to live in London, the traffic will inevitably spill out across the other bridges and tunnels, and before long they will introduce tolls there too. I’ve lived in London my whole life, but never has it felt more desolate, more of a lost cause. I look at the new builds popping up along the dual carriageway, encroaching their way into fish island (the warehouse district and it’s weird and wonderful inhabitants that sits on increasingly borrowed time) and think how soon this city will just be full of commuters in new flats, creating “new communities” on the still-warm unmarked graves of the decades worth of actual communities that lived on that ground before the rent was £1200pcm not including bills. Not that I can talk - my own family pushed out of where we grew up, my great grandma’s whole street flattened and now a shopping centre, a Pret and a Vue cinema - everywhere I move to I feel I am intruding upon.

I wonder if the plague pit is real, and if so, how the bodies within it feel about the annual funfair. I wonder if it brings them joy, the smell of candyfloss, the tinny music rising above the sound of traffic - or whether the garish colours irritate them, the litter desecrating their rudimentary grave. Perhaps the toll booths will mean less footfall across their green expanse.

6.15am, 20th October

Daylight is teasing at the still-night sky, an inky gloom that hangs heavily over the houses, like sticky eyelids weighted with sleep. 

The lighter hue of morning is pushing its way up from the bottom of the horizon, the line where the sky meets buildings and trees is now tinged with a greyish white that is ever so slowly increasing, seeping upwards, forcing the dark sky back into the recesses of night, for now. I watch it fade through the train window, enjoying the tranquility of the hushed grey dawn, getting a head start on the day while the majority of the city is still curled and dreaming. 

I’m finally back working, although it’s only part time so I’m still searching for something else to make ends meet. It’s another cleaning job, and despite the early mornings being a challenge in the darker months, I enjoy self-directed work and routine more than it probably seems. It’s also great finishing my shifts before the few hours of winter daytime are up.

As the cold has crept in this year, my dreams and aspirations have felt more and more frozen, iced over, suspended and paused as I try to sort jobs and housing, and day-to-day life operations. Frequently I wonder if I’ll ever actually ‘make it’ - or what that even means. All I know is it feels good after a long shift, getting into bed after a bath…I just wish that shift could have been doing my own projects, or things that satisfied that hunger I have to create that never seems to go away. I wonder also, if maybe that feeling is just the curse of all artists - maybe that feeling never goes away, and we must spend our lives frantically making to appease it, to no avail. I’m not sure if that’s necessarily a bad thing…I’ve been told it’s good to have purpose.

August

Intermittent bleeps from a walkie-talkie

Sharing strawberry laces in a car pool

The water used to feel so

Cold, filling kettles up, too much and now there’s steam rising 

Sun on childhood skin beaming rays of youth running barefoot over rough scorched grass

Catching lizards in the brickwork

Big hands rough towelling

It’s got to be done or you’ll catch cold

Careful not to choke on those orange lollipops sitting in the backseat.

Did you know it is the anniversary?

Those sandwiches were something else

Not that I ever tasted them 

Buckle and bend in search of that

Feeling

warm sun lounger, snacks after swimming

Poker as the night creeps in.

It’s colder than it used to be

Sharper vision than the rosy haze of memory. 

1:14pm Friday, 22nd November

This week has been the first cold week - everything was regular, predictable, until I went outside on Monday and suddenly my trousers were no longer thick enough to stop the biting wind stinging my legs. I miss the time where we had seasons - it felt like we used to get more time to adapt, whereas now each change in the weather is thrust upon us overnight. I’m planning on cutting my hair today, possibly quite short on the top which maybe in retrospect isn’t the best decision in the cold - but at least it will mean I won’t have to worry about hat hair. Pros and cons, always.

I’ve not been the most present person since moving house, focusing on each day at a time has meant I have not seen as many friends as I would like to. That, and I turned 27, which altogether threw me off kilter with just how strange and adult it sounds, vs how small, convoluted and lost I often feel. I’m very slowly starting to come to terms with it, mostly by trying not to think about it…as much as I try to separate myself from any ideas of age as a guide to how we should be living or what we should be doing at any one time, it is daunting to feel myself slipping into my ‘late twenties’, without feeling like I have completed all I wanted to in that time.

I went to see Tracey Emin’s exhibition at The White Cube on my actual birthday, largely because I saw one of her previous shows there on my 17th exactly 10 years prior. I love a full circle moment. I’ll end this with some of my thoughts on the show, as I feel they capture a lot of my emotions about many things at the moment:

The gallery is strewn with passion and yet simultaneously sits desolate, emptiness hanging in the air, a body not yet cold. It feels like an analogy of life itself - we claw, scratch and gouge our way through the mortal world, leaving marks, fighting to stay alive, but eventually no matter how hard we kick it all ends eventually. All revolutionaries die, it’s this inescapable quietness that waits for all of us, good or bad, rich or poor, regardless of the work we’ve created. The bright lights of our galleries will eventually illuminate our retrospective, the halls of our skeleton hushed and brooding. We follow love, of all kinds, through the passage of time until we find that it can’t lead us any further. And yet despite this knowledge, a knowledge that sits deep and we’ve carried for eternity, we follow it until the end.  

Until next time,

Eerie